I ended yesterday’s “Word!” with “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” and wrote that I’d get back to that phrase today. As I always do, I googled it (remember, my kids call me “Rabbi Google”). In 1915 a Christian anarchist writer named Elbert Hubbart wrote an obituary for Marshall Pinckney Wilder, an actor who was a little-person. Hubbart wrote about Pinckney’s optimism, stating, “He was of sound mind in an unsound body. He proved the eternal paradox of things. He cashed in on his disabilities. He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.”

There are those who say that it was popularized by Dale Carnegie in 1948 who, in his book, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living,” wrote, “If you have a lemon, make a lemonade,” but Carnegie said he picked it up from Julius Rosenwald, of Sears Roebuck fame.

Now of particular interest is that Lessing Rosenwald, Julius’ son, was once president of the American Council for Judaism which was an association of Reform Jews who were vehemently anti-Zionists. It is said that one of the major contributors of anti-Jewish State propaganda used by the Arab nations to argue their point in the United Nations was the executive director of the ACJ, indeed a Reform rabbi named Elmer Berger. *

Returning to the point, this proverb, if you will, gained a great deal of fame in various areas of literature and the arts. There have been many variations, one of which was used by a taco stand in Texas whose motto was, “When life gives you lemons/limes, put it on a taco.”

It seems though that the truth behind the phrase cannot be diminished. It’s up to us to make the best of whatever life hands us even though at times that seems so very difficult. When this stinkin’ pandemic becomes only a line in the history books (surely it will be more than a line, but it will be history), we should then all have a lemonade life!